It's all in the Family

Antique to post-modern, their music's off the map

January 26, 2002|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Rennie Sparks, who shares the Handsome Family name with husband Brett, was regaling the audience at the sold-out Hideout with between-songs banter that someday will have to be preserved in a box-set recording at the Smithsonian as an example of early 21st Century humor, surrealist division.

The soul-crushing job she and her husband once held, she told the audience Thursday, was in "the next town past where the map ends."

The same could be said of the Handsome Family's twisted neo-country tunes: They come from somewhere off the map, very much of America yet somehow disturbingly alien. It's as if these songs make us look at things we dare not see, or certainly are not invited to see in most contemporary pop songs.

Handsome Family music manages to sound both antique and postmodern. Rennie Sparks strums an autoharp, a homely instrument once most closely identified with the Carter Family, while Brett Sparks fiddles with automated drum beats. She cautiously plays one-fingered "solos" on a tiny keyboard that looks like it could be had for 20 bucks at a flea market. He follows a demented electric guitar solo --fierce, fractured, dissonant, like James "Blood" Ulmer deconstructing a honky-tonk tune -- by scratching out a rattlesnake rhythm on a washboard.

Through the magnifying lens of their quirkiness, the lyrics of Rennie Sparks illuminate the horror, tragedy and comedy of the everyday. She does almost all the talking between songs, a kind of stream-of-consciousness self-mockery that plays like an extension of her stunningly melancholy song-poems. During the songs themselves, she is the serene foil, the minimalist accompanist on bass, the embroiderer of melodies on autoharp and keyboard. Brett Sparks takes his wife's lyrics and imbues them with dignity, his baritone voice the stuff of pre-rock 'n' roll crooners, church choirs, Nat King Cole and Carter Stanley. He invests a line about a million passenger pigeons being "clubbed and shot, netted, gassed and burned, until there was nothing left but miles of empty nests" with such mellow, honeyed warmth, he could have been singing a child to sleep.

At times, singer-guitarist Edward Burch and Nora O'Connor became extended Family members, their voices providing comradeship even as the songs spoke of loneliness and despair. There is a vague serenity at work in the Handsome's music, a sense that dusk is falling, the planet is spinning, and there is nothing the fallible characters in their songs can do to forestall the inevitable. The dying, it begins as soon as we are born, and that priceless knowledge has allowed the great songwriters through the centuries, from the Scottish balladeers to Hank Williams Sr., to savor every living moment. The Handsome Family carry on that tradition, unhurried observers of the slow decline that is the human condition. The hymnlike radiance of their melodies, the unwavering steadiness of their tempos and the exotic meld of their instruments conjure a planet of horrible beauty: the very one we all share, whether we know it or not, the one "past where the map ends."